Are Your Children a Failure if They Don’t Grow up to be Doctors or Lawyers?

Jewish mothers are stereotyped as wanting their children to become doctors or lawyers.  Given the sheer number of Jewish physicians and attorneys (notwithstanding the apparent shortage of medical professionals in Israel), it seems that mothers are doing an excellent job of influencing their children.

However, when such professions are not appropriate for a particular child, what is a Jewish mother to do?

A few years ago, I heard what I considered to be a very enlightened principal of a school say something like the following: 

I had a student come to me that got 30% on a test.  His teachers and parents were criticizing him because he had done so poorly.  I told him that I was proud of him.  He got 100% on the questions for which he knew the answers.

 

 

One of my friends, as a present to his children upon completion of army duty, spends a not small amount of money to enable his children to take career aptitude/interest tests conducted by professionals.  As an example, for one of his sons, the results showed a good match for a dietician.  Almost certainly this young man would never have considered this particular job as a profession.  Yet, because he took the test, he decided to further investigate, and now, a few years later, after completing the relevant studies, he is happily working as a dietician.

Over my years of assisting job seekers find work, there have been many occasions when a mother or father has contacted me about work for their adult child.  This is an immediate red flag for me, and I always tell the parent that their child is welcome to be in direct touch with me.  Not once has the child ever contacted me after an approach from the parent.

Choosing a job/profession is difficult enough to do based upon your own interests/aptitude, without having to take into account expectations of others.  And, living in the 21^st century, making a career/job choice at one particular point of time is not as critical as it was for previous generations.  According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics in the US, people nowadays average more than five careers in their lifetime.  And while I would tend to believe that the longer someone must study for a profession, the less likely the person is to change, I have met with many professionals that were burned out and wanted to do something else.  In fact, I am one such person, leaving a hi-tech career after 20 years.

And, if you do experience anxiety that your child is not living up to your expectations for them professionally, and this worry is manifested by eating too much, you are welcome to be in touch with me - I can connect you with a good dietician :>)

Can Career Personality Tests Guide You to a New Job?

I envy those professionals that enjoy their sector – I was one myself once. Teachers, lawyers, doctors, Java programmers – everyone that is working in a defined role in which there is a demand and doesn’t have to invest a lot of effort considering which job to target when they are seeking work.

Alas, many job seekers do not fall into this category, either because their work history does not correspond into a specific category or because they are interested in a variety of work roles. Or, the problematic case of people looking for employment that have no idea what they want to do!

For someone that is stumped identifying which types of jobs to target, a visit with an employment advisor is certainly recommended. In addition, many job seekers turn to the Internet and search for sites that can help them identify careers that match their interests/skills. Here is an article on this subject: http://jobsearchinisrael.blogspot.com/2010/03/transferable-skills-professions.html.

One category of resources that people use is career (personality) tests. The idea is that after answering a battery of questions, you will be labeled with a profile as well as a list of jobs that can be suitable for people with that profile. Sounds great, right? Well, as with most things, it’s not so simple. I remember that when I was in high school in the US, I took the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) test. This was the test that our school counselors told us all to take in the 11th grade to understand where we should be focusing our future attentions. As with astrology newspaper predictions, you can always find something in these reports which can be used as validation for yourself; for instance in my results the lowest ranked job was to work as a ditch digger, which made sense to me. However, there were a bunch of other details, totally forgotten by me now, which my school counselors advised that I should interpret as solid facts. Unfortunately I don’t have the results now (lost together with my baseball card collection), as I am sure it would be interesting to look at now.

As time passed, I have become a firm believer that desire is a (the) critical influencer in estimating career success. Yet, as an example, one career test measures the candidate’s personality related to extroversion/introversion, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, judging/perceiving. All of these indicators are useful as input for a person to generalize about their personality, but they completely ignore desire, which many career experts feel trumps all else. Bruce Springsteen says that he was advised by his parents and everyone else (older than him presumably) to go to college and be practical, yet he followed his dream and has the gratitude of my generation for his decision. There are countless well-known tales of famous people, entertainers and business moguls, who suffered through years of failure before they succeeded, using their undying motivation to ultimately reach their goal.

Nonetheless, because I know it is difficult for people that are looking for work without a solid objective(s) to move forward, even with all of the pitfalls, I do think there is some value in taking a test or two and looking at the results, as long as they are reviewed with the proper perspective. So, without further ado, here is a link to some of the popular and free career tests:
http://www.positionignition.com/blog/2010/7/2/5-popular-career-personality-tests.html.